Stirring The Pot

Recently, Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, former Republican vice-presidential candidate, former beauty queen, and bona fide quitter and nut job, posted the following on her Facebook page:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Huh? Has the world gone mad? Where do people get this stuff? Does Ms. Palin really believe that President Obama plans to set up a panel to decide who does and does not deserve health care? We already have that; it’s called the insurance companies. Just try to find affordable health insurance coverage if you have a so-called pre-existing condition. Or if you lose your health insurance because you lost your job. Since the insurance companies are in business to make big profits, they can hardly be expected to jump at the chance to cover people who will actually need medical care. After all, paying out for medical care really cuts into those profits, you know. That’s why we need health insurance reform that at the very least includes a public option, something like, uh, the highly successful and wildly popular government-run health insurance program called Medicare.

Does Sarah really believe what she wrote on her Facebook page, or is she just trying to rouse the political nuttery with her crazy talk, stirring the pot of fear, hatred, and racism that had become Republican politics? And why do so many people repeatedly fall for these predictable right-wing scare tactics? Hasn’t experience taught everyone to be very, very skeptical of anything that comes from the Republican fear machine?

Thank goodness I have my knitting to keep me sane during the August recess and the health care “debate.” The Buckeye Arches socks are coming along nicely. Sock #1 is almost finished and I think it looks fabulous. What do you think?

I hope to finish the sock today and cast on sock #2.

My Norfolk sweater is progressing nicely, too. I have the back from the armhole to the neck almost finished. Pretty nice, eh? It’s really knitting up far faster than I had expected, considering I’m using 2.75mm needles and fingering-weight yarn knitted at a gauge of 7.5 stitches per inch.

It’s pretty mindless knitting, so I have been working on it while watching Ballykissangel streamed to my iMac from Netflix. Knitting makes for a nice vacation from the right-wing hate machine.